JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

Generic engineering : a study of parody in selected works of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Tom Stoppard

Van der Merwe, Stephen Gareth (2004-04)

Thesis (MA)-- Stellenbosch University, 2004.

Full text to be digitised and attached to bibliographic record.

Thesis

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The following thesis develops a theory of parody as a multifunctional practice in
relation to selected works of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Tom Stoppard. The study
discusses parody as a mode of generic engineering (rather than a genre itself) with
ideological ramifications. Based on an understanding of literary and non-literary
genres as social institutions, this thesis describes the practice of parody as one of
engineering generic or discursive incongruity with a particular cultural purpose in
mind. In refiguring generic conventions, the parodist simultaneously reworks their
implicit ideological premises. Parody hence comes to serve as a means of negotiating
with "the world" through generic modification, and the notions of parodic social
agency and cultural work are consequently central to this thesis.
Focusing on The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest
respectively, Chapters Two and Three discuss Wilde's use of parody, and especially
parodic "word-masks", for subverting the aesthetic and social conventions of
Victorian England, and covertly propagating a gay subculture through parodic injokes.
Word-masks - central to Wildean parody - entail the duplicitous use of an
object text / genre as a cover under which a parodist hides other meanings.
If Wildean parody might be described as claiming a covert agency, Joycean parody
must, in contrast, be acknowledged as expressing deep-seated political ambivalence.
Chapters Four and Five of this thesis discuss Joyce's Ulysses with specific reference
to his use of parody to conflate, relativize and problematize the dominant aesthetic
and Irish nationalist discourses of the early twentieth-century. Joycean parody also demonstrates parodic ambivalence and this is especially evident in what might be
called his "parodic patriotism".
In contrast to Wilde's and Joyce's use of parody for the expression of subversive or
progressive political views, Stoppard's parodies confirm conservative English values
not only in their reification of the English canon but also in terms of the ideological
premises with which they invest their hypotexts. Chapters Six and Seven examine
how parody can serve as one of the ways in which modem artists have managed to
come to terms with tradition. Focusing on Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead and Travesties respectively, these chapters explore parody's capacity to
function as tribute or homage to the writers of the past being parodied.
Ultimately this thesis aims to demonstrate the continuum of parodic cultural work or
effects of which parody, as a mode of generic engineering, is capable.